Now Sony Speaks on Virtual Reality

Virtual ready is ready to be a major theme one week from now at the Diversion Designers Meeting, and now one of the key players has talked up to say the time is a good fit for VR to truly lift up, up and away. Shawn Layden, the president of Sony PC Game America, examined the capability of VR on the most recent Playstation Blogcast and hinted that Sony will make a few declarations about PlayStation VR one week from now amid GDC.

“We’re going to have a lot of things to talk about in that regard at the Game Developers Conference coming up soon in San Francisco,” he said. Sony has a PlayStation VR event scheduled for Tuesday, March 15.

Two of the greatest remaining inquiries regarding the PlayStation 4 headset are around its cost and discharge date. It’s conceivable Sony will at last answer those inquiries one week from now at GDC, yet starting yet this is yet to be confirmed. Whatever the case, Layden is plainly amped up for VR’s potential.

“It’s a perfect storm now for VR technology,” he said. “It’s a concept that’s been kicking around for quite some time. Some of us remember Virtual Boy way back in the day and a lot of different companies have had a go at virtual reality technology.

“I think right now we have a combination of the necessary processing power and graphics power inside the machine,” he added. “We have the display technology which can realize these images at a fidelity which looks natural, if you will. And we have the production technology to create a headset and a rig that is well-suited for the human head that won’t create a tiresome experience.”

With all of these elements combined, “I think now is the time for VR; its time has come,” Layden said. Not only does VR stand to impact the gaming space (Layden said he foresees new genres and categories coming to bear), but other fields of entertainment such as film will move forward with VR.

The launching of PlayStation VR (and Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) this year could be a fireworks moment for virtual reality.

“VR can be to console gaming like smartphones are to feature phones. That leap,” he said. “When the smartphone came out, it’s like, ‘Well, it’s an iPod but I can make a phone call; what does that mean?’ We had no idea then what it would mean to us now. And I think, looking five years into the future, we’re going to look back on today and say, ‘Wow, there’s so much we didn’t know that VR was going to do for us but we do know it now.”

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